Gigabyte Breaks Ivy Bridge and DDR3 Overclocking World Records

Who doesn’t love some good ‘ole fashioned overclocking? Professional overclocker HiCookie employed liquid nitrogen cooling to push an Intel Ivy Bridge Core i7 3770K processor to 7.03 GHz, breaking the previous world record. In addition, he managed to push four DIMMs of G.Skill Trident X DDR3 memory to an amazing 3.28 GHz!

Popular motherboard manufacturer Gigabyte announced today that its motherboards have been used to shatter the previous Ivy Bridge CPU and DDR3 RAM world records. Using liquid nitrogen and a Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H motherboard, the overclocker pushed the i7 3770K to 7.03 GHz. The overclock is only running on a single core (two threads), but it does show that at least some Ivy Bridge processors are capable of high overclocks despite the issues some CPUs are having. The CPUz validation and HWBot submission are available here: CPUz, HWBot.

The Z77-UD3H motherboard used to take Ivy Bridge to 7.03 GHz.

As far as memory overclocking, the company used it’s GA-Z77X-UD5H motherboard and four G.Skill Trident X DDR3 DIMMs rated for 2800 MHz to achieve 3,280 MHz speeds under heavy overclocking. Gigabyte claims that the feat was due in part to their memory tuning capabilities and motherboard engineering. It seems crazy to think that only a few years ago, people were running 800 MHz memory–and this overclocked RAM is currently running faster than my i7 860 processor!

Deputy Director of Motherboard Marketing Tim Handley stated in the press release that "these new world records highlight our belief that top notch quality and design deliver truly world-class, record breaking performance.” They also hinted that a new series of motherboards that will be released at Computex 2012 are showing even better overclocking abilities.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for Gigabyte’s new world record to be broken. I hope that whoever does break it manages to do it with more than one core as well. The full press release is available here.